For engineers working with today's emerging broadband communication systems and evolving spectrum management policies, signal analyzers are indispensable tools for research, product development, manufacturing and field-testing. Existing signal analyzers are typically monolithic systems that are geared toward real-time analysis rather than signal observation. As such, these systems are less flexible or inflexible if the system operator wishes to precisely observe multiple dimensions simultaneously. Current signal analyzers limit the ability to trade among time resolution, frequency resolution, and instantaneous bandwidth, and to extend observation periods arbitrarily. These monolithic systems are also not implemented in an automated, distributed, and synchronized manner. Many such systems are based on swept-tuned spectrum analyzers with fixed instantaneous bandwidth that require more time to monitor a given frequency band resulting in fewer observations of each spectral segment.
What is needed is a system with the ability to observe signals in multiple receiver channels using a single spectrum analyzer.